(Newser)
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For all of you who have spent the past nine months wondering how Julianne Moore’s Sarah Palin impersonation will stack up against Tina Fey’s, you finally have your answer. HBO debuted its first teaser trailer for Game Change, the film due in March that's based on the Mark Halperin-John Heilemann book about the 2008 presidential election. Neither Ed Harris as John McCain nor Woody Harrelson as top adviser Steve Schmidt sound much like their real-life counterparts, notes David Jackson in USA Today, but Moore’s Palin is spot-on: Numerous publications including People, New York, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel are fairly impressed.

Moore’s Palin is also scary. Some observations:

“It's nice to finally see McCain's decision to unleash Palin on America set to tense, frightening music, just like it is in our nightmares,” writes Margaret Hartmann on Jezebel.

Jon Bershad concurs: “The clip is edited to treat Julianne Moore’s Palin basically like the shark in Jaws,” he writes on Mediaite. “Seriously, the only way this thing could be more on the nose would be if they played a record scratch right before she started talking and showed a dog reaction shot right after. Seriously, Woody Harrelson even gets in a ‘Spielberg face’ look of awed horror when he glimpses the candidate.”

Last but not least, from Jim Newell on Gawker: “This clip suggests that, well, Sarah Palin may not be portrayed very nicely? It's a dark, frightening affair, backed by ominous music, all serving as a build-up to Palin's speech at the Republican convention, as though it's the first wave in a global alien invasion or perhaps the dawn of a nuclear winter. Woody Harrelson appears to shit his pants.”